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What is a canoe trip?

Canoe trips in the Boundary Waters can take on the character of people and the desires of the paddlers. A canoe trip in the user-friendly Boundary Waters can be easy and relaxing or industrious and energetic or anywhere in between. With small children the easy, fun and somewhat relaxing mode is what you want. No pushing please. Just the family and friends and a short paddle to a lovely campsite nestled in the pines with a view of the sunset. Now that’s a canoe trip. How about some fresh walleyes for dinner cooked in the griddle over a hot fire. Bring the kids in summer when the water is warm and the days are long. The kids won’t even miss their hardware of software. No kids? That’s ok. Escape the technological world and find the peace of the Boundary Waters one lake away from the parking lot. The older we get the more appealing this trip is.

A canoe trip can be a journey too; paddling a route through a chain of lakes and portages that lead to the most remote place you can find in the 2 million acres of wilderness in Canoe Country. It can be tough days over lots of portages and across wind swept lakes just after the ice goes out in spring or in the painted month of September. On that trip you may find sleep comes so easily you start thinking about the cozy down sleeping bag just after you put away the dinner dishes. You take photos along the route, you fish wherever you go and you climb the hills to get the views of the lakes spread out before you. There is so much to do on that canoe trip, a week will seem like a day and you go home satisfied that wilderness got in your blood and you got deep into wilderness.

I think for most people the words canoe trip in the Boundary Waters means some hard paddling and portaging and some relaxing, some fishing and some hiking, some sipping coffee by the fire and some packing up and moving on. There is no right way to experience a canoe trip and of course no wrong way. We take care of the land wherever we go on a canoe trip, leave our campsites better then when we arrived and make sure our family and friends are having an experience they will cherish. That’s what a canoe trip is all about and that’s what we’ll give you for advice as you set out from our canoe racks into the wilderness.